7th Sunday after Pentecost, July 27th, 2025

Sermon: 7th Sunday after Pentecost, July 27th, 2025

Text: Luke 11:1-13, Genesis 18:20-32

Grace, Peace, and Mercy from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

After my first Christmas Eve service here at House of Prayer, I was invited by my mentors, now colleagues in pastoral ministry to a laid back, Chinese take-out-dinner to celebrate. Pastor Robin Lutjohann, my pastor at Faith Lutheran, gave me an unplanned Christmas gift: a prayer book called For All the Saints. He then wrote me a letter inside the first pages of the prayer book on the spot, and what he wrote to me something I will always treasure as God-given advice: “Do develop a discipline of consistent daily prayer. It is not possible to last in ministry without it. May Satan flee from your prayer!” How valuable this has been for me, because truly, when prayer is absent, the spiritual well dries up, so enclosed in my own mind and worries instead of lifting those burdens to the One who can help me bear them. And not only that, that in this community you have called me to pray for you, to lift your cause to God’s ear, to pray alongside you. So how important it is that we as Christians persist in prayer! The prayer of a Christian is a powerful thing, it sows love in the hearts of human beings, it softens their edges, it reaches out to Him that liberates us from what oppresses us . In today’s reading we not only see Jesus giving us an example to follow by giving us our most treasured prayer, but He also is revealing a way of relating to God as He truly is, our loving Father in Heaven. And because He is our Father who comes near to us and hears us, He wants us to run to His embrace, as any loving parent would to their child.

Prayer is at the heart of the Church’s collective life, but often on the individual level, prayer is one of those easy to forget tasks of the Christian, even though it is one of the most accessible to us. Prayer is easily forgotten in our daily life if we are not careful. It is so easy for the day’s busyness to overtake our time of intentional connection with God. Even though God stands alongside us, with or without our prayer, He nonetheless commands us to pray, to be in heartfelt communication with Him often. How else are we human beings to relate to Him if not by speaking out our hearts? God has made Himself approachable to us in the best way we know how, and what a gift that is! To be able to exist in this complex world full of goodness and trial, and to be able to connect with the One who weaves together the beauty of creation, and rallies up His solidarity with us in the difficulties of it. Prayer is that time where we can let our defenses down, we can be truly honest, we let God see us in the fullness of our being. Yet neglecting this time of connection, we then become vulnerable from another standpoint. We start to inhabit the compulsions of our own unchecked waywardness, we become hermetically sealed to our own ecosystem of despair or self-deception. Prayer allows us to open the window to let the fresh air of God in. We can be curious in faith to see where God will lead us by another way we could not see.

The disciples’ curiosity of Jesus’ prayer life gave the world a great gift: The Lord’s Prayer, that prayer that no matter where you are from, we can connect to it intimately across language, culture, and ideological difference. Their curiosity opened the way for Jesus to teach them a fresh understanding of God. Like when a child sees their parent doing something for the first time, in loving imitation, we undertake to do as our loved ones do. I know that I learned to pray as my mother and father prayed. With my mother, on our knees, sometimes a little bit too long, but always with deep feeling and tears. With my father, at work, through example in the silences of daily tasks. So as disciples of Jesus, by being in Christ, we are invited to relate and speak to God as He did. The Lord’s prayer unites us across differences as a people that call upon God as Abba Father.

Yet, how often do we sit at the sidelines and stifle the radical message of the Lord’s Prayer. Having grown accustomed to reciting it for 2000 years, we can often not insert ourselves into its wavelength. Luther called it the greatest martyr in all Christendom and for good reason. It was not uncommon apparently for priests to say the words of the liturgy with such lack of attention and care, that Luther recalled a priest who was officiating mass at the same time as he was commanding his workers to fetch the horse carriage and milk the cows between the verses.

If we but only saw the treasure we have in this prayer! It covers everything we need, plus we are at liberty to expand upon its example. We get to call upon God has our loving Father, worthy of reverence and awe; we are intimately met by the great mystery that inspires the very human instinct of prayer. We ask that God’s goodness may reign upon the earth. We ask for our physical and spiritual needs. We ask for forgiveness, we confess where we have fallen short, and are prompted to be open to receive God’s mercy. And finally, we are led to ask for God’s accompaniment in trial and temptation, that when the difficulties arise, God may secure us in His hands. The whole breadth of human life can be encapsulated in such simple words, so that when we have no strength or inspiration to pray, we have the Lord’s words that we can stand upon, waiting for us to make them our own. We have these words because they allow us to see that God indeed listens and is aware of our every need, that He is with us in the trials of living. And more so, that by our prayer and connection with Him, we are inviting a new world to come about for the good of all.

Prayer can seem difficult because we might think it is only wishful thinking, or talking to the air, or perhaps we do not see the results of what we ask in prayer. What does prayer actually give us? Prayer opens up our hearts to receive God’s presence and will. We pray for our very lives, but prayer is not the quarter we insert in a cosmic lottery machine, that is not the objective of prayer. Jesus in this text tells us as much at the end: “how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!” Of all the things that we can ask, and of all the things that God can give us in prayer, the greatest gift He gives is Himself through the Holy Spirit. In prayer we put our whole being in relationship to God. That Holy Spirit that transforms our lives into beings of love and mercy. That Holy Spirit that widens our generosity. That Holy Spirit that strengthens us when we are weak. That Holy Spirit that carries us when we can’t go on no more by our own strength. It is truly the major object of prayer that God so readily gives to us amid the real challenges of this life.

So Jesus commands us: persist in prayer, persevere! Live in the atmosphere of prayer. Luther says to pester God’s ears with God’s promises! Often, this way of prayerful living changes the dynamics of how we relate to the world and those around us. When we pray, what comes to the surface from the depths of our being is what we care for the most. Our most ultimate concern is ever before us lifted up the great Mystery of this God. The Presbyterian minister and writer Frederick Buechner wrote: “Be importunate, Jesus says, not, one assumes, because you have to beat a path to God’s door before God will open it, but because until you beat the path maybe there’s no way of getting to your door… keep on beating the path to God’s door, because the one thing you can be sure of is that, down the path you beat with even your most half-cocked and halting prayer, the God you call upon will finally come.”

Prayer opens up avenues of thought and action that we usually cannot see, because we start to inhabit the God-way of seeing things. And God’s way is a radical re-orientation of life, again from Buechner:

“We do well not to pray the Lord’s prayer lightly. It takes guts to pray it at all. We can pray it in the unthinking and perfunctory way we usually do only by disregarding what we are saying. “Thy will be done” is what we are saying. We are asking God to be God. We are asking God to do not what we want, but what God wants. We are asking God to make manifest the holiness that is now mostly hidden, to set free in all its terrible splendor the devastating power that is now mostly under restraint. “Thy kingdom come . . . on earth” is what we are saying. And if that were suddenly to happen, what then? What would stand and what would fall? Who would be welcomed in and who would be thrown the hell out? Which if any of our most precious visions of what God is and of what human beings are would prove to be more or less on the mark and which would turn out to be phony as three-dollar bills? Boldness indeed”

So let us indeed be bold in prayer, to persist and be brought close to the mystery of God ever changing us and making of us a people of transformative love. That we might be as bold as Abraham, and be intercessors for mercy, compassion and justice in the world. To be a people of prayer is to invite a revolution of the heart into the world, God’s revolution. So let us then relish this gift and pray: